No Reservations
by victoriassecret96
Summary: While filming an episode of Kitchen Nightmares, Gordon Ramsay's loins are set alight by the failing restaurant's star waitress, a young lesbian who's working a hospitality job to support herself as she completes a BA in gender studies and creative writing. During a night of raw hotel sex, her confusing urges overwhelm her and Ramsay, forcing her to confront her illegible desires.


Walk into the room an open wound and see Gordon sitting on the bed like salt. Does he see you? You've been on the verge – of tears, realising, resolve, desire – for so fucking _long_ , the fact that you haven't just slipped off the edge seems statistically off, like that spinning top at the end of inception.

There's always been this question mark hanging over Leonardo's head. Do you want to be with him, or do you want to be him? Who cares. Gordon's as old as the glens, as old as your father – he's been left out to dry in a Scottish wind with the last memories of boyhood growing out of his scalp grey. You want to ask him so many things.

 _Do you miss being yourself? Did you look like a lesbian too, before you went through the same masculinisation process as Justin Bieber?1_

He's here because even people who make talking seem like groping in the dark seem to figure out how to get people back to hotel rooms. You're here because you liked the way he threw out shouts like it was his job. Yelling and swearing actually _is_ his job but he seems to take a genuine, perverse, non-alienated pleasure in ripping into and out of language like it's not the tether that keeps us together, but rather the very thing that's meant to work us over until we realise how alone we've always been.

"Why don't you take your heels off, love? You've been on your feet all day," he says, pushing off the bed to pour two aspirated glasses of alcohol in celebration. His term of endearment ricochets off of your awareness of how misogyny is eroticised, and hits the target between your thighs. But even as you self-reflexively get wet, you feel a fog of confusion floating above the reach of your own internal mechanisms of analysis.

 _What are we drinking to? Why am I even here?_

Who, in other words, can afford transition, whether that transition be a move from female to male, a journey across the border and back, a holiday in the sun, a trip to the moon, a passage to a new body, a one-way ticket to white manhood? Who, on the other hand, can afford to stay home, who can afford to make a home, build a new home, move homes, have no home, leave home? Who can afford metaphors?2

Your stockinged foot sinking into carpet doesn't feel like the haptic premonition that it could be; the soft promise of skin slipping against skin gives way to the stuttering exhale of shuffling out of costume. Lately, dressing like a woman has started to feel like a daily drag.

 _Did I ever really enjoy it? Or was I just holding out hope that one day I might live up to the erotic promise of my own obedience?_

How can I explain what is happening to me? What can I do about my desire for transformation? 3

"C'mere, darling," he says, offering you a flute of champagne with an outstretched hand. You look at his fingers on the stem of the glass like a teen stuck on a pregnancy test; suddenly it all makes sense. Coming to his hotel room had the air of obligation but to accept this drink, now, would be an RSVP to an invitation.

What can I do about all the years I defined myself as a feminist?4

You walk forward as if possessed, feeling _alive_ with the fear of being fucked by someone as old as your father – someone who has daughters but won't let you feel the paternal safety he knows how to create, someone who doesn't have the anxious, conflicting empathies of a gender-grey post-seventies boy born into an era of masculinity in crisis, someone who you don't have to worry about at all because he's not leaving without taking care of himself. The pull between your beliefs and his briefs is a tug-of-war of distance and familiarity, desire and disgust. He's the hyperarticulation of hyper-cis, hyper-masculine, hyper-white manhood and his meteoric rise in the food industry rolls your eyes into resentment when you consider how much domestic, culinary labour has been performed by women without a simple "thanks". But instead of turning you off, the grotesque context of his systemic net worth emboldens you.

 _I mean nothing to him. He means nothing to me. This means nothing. We can fuck like we're not even human._

Kneeling on the floor like a nobody, you're finally where you want to be: hidden from (lesbian-feminist) self-reflection in the shadow of someone else's power. Your lips glide and stutter down Gordon's cock, pull up then back, up then back, and your gut clenches with impossible desire; you know it's wrong but you wish he looked the same while forcing you to bury your face into his cunt. There's nowhere you'd rather be than here but every night you pray to One Direction that you'll die and wake up corpsed in between a teen dream's thighs. It's not that cock feels wrong – you've just always been a sucker for symmetry. In a state of confusion, your lips pop off Gordon's dick and, seemingly sensing that you're floating away, he throws you down, spreads your legs and comes at you cunt-first. It feels clumsy, just like you expected it would. You have certain sexpectations after spending too long facesitting in the shade of second-wave sapphics and their cunning linguistics. The change of pace gives you time to consider him.

Looking down at Gordon's blonded skull, smirking at how rarely he must be on his knees, you act on the urge to arch up aggressively and dig the heel of your foot into his shoulder – hard. Your pussy muffles whatever sound your first kick elicits but the second, awkward press of your foot into his upper back works like you've just slammed the accelerator on a Bugatti. You only remember you're a girl getting increasingly heated head and not a WWE wrestler choreographing an elaborate sequence of homoerotic horseplay, when you register the pitch of your own exhale-sigh as the index of your oestrogen. Thinking of luxury cars, leather seats, leotards, boxing rings, blonde hair and the magnetic bitchiness of duelling arrogance, a more familiar kind of white noise rings in your ears.

"Kneel, Potter." Malfoy's pupils were so large in the dim light.

Merlin. Harry tried to remember why this had seemed like a good idea. Malfoy just stood there, waiting. Harry slid down onto the wooden kneeler, while Malfoy stood, his face unreadable.

"Why do I have to kneel?"

"To show humility. When we confess, we are sorrowful and ashamed. Do you feel ashamed?"5

The air stills to make way for how blurry everything else is, as all the atoms in the room shift and rearrange; your heart ahooga's with the arrhythmia of a post-orgasm cunt-spasm. You're not stubborn enough in yourself to remain unmoved as the world around you remakes itself, so it's no surprise that you feel exactly the same but completely different when you realise that you're not in bed with Gordon anymore. You're now looking down at Draco Malfoy, slowly sitting up in a dog collar.

"Potter." Malfoy's voice was quietly insistent. "Have you had impure thoughts?"6

"I-I don't know," you say, because things haven't felt right for so long now, that you've been living like feeling wrong is normal. Malfoy smirks back at you in the way that only a rich man can: like the only problem he'll ever have to solve is his own erection.

"There's only one thing you need to know and I suspect you already know it," he starts, leering at your naked chest – which now you look down at it, is more boyish than it's ever been – "seen from behind we are all women; the anus does not practice sexual discrimination.''7

Before you can wonder what the fuck that means, you're falling forward onto your hands and knees, eyes flicking up to Malfoy in panicked askance. He's not the one knocking your knees apart and handling your arse as if it were property, but whoever's behind you is a shadow of Malfoy: what you want from him, what he sees in you, wha-nnnnggghhhh. Your eyes are flickering open and closed to yourself, to the world, to _everything_ because now there's a _tongue_ testing the tight ring of your arsehole, laving lasciviously and asking, looking, begging, probing! But searching for wh-ahhhhhfhjdkf? The shitty truth that you probably shouldn't call yourself a dyke but there's no word gay enough to bullseye your libido with a name?

 _Maybe he means that from behind we are all men; the anus does not practice sexual discrimination._

"Do you like it? Do you like letting yourself do these shameful things? Down on your knees, thinking about other men?"8

"Yesssssssssssss" you hiss, snake-like and scaled in gender lawlessness and its lustful fallout, like a fashion journalist in love with Mick Jagger. Your arse chills when lips leave to crawl up your back and a silk shirt ripples against your spine. The taut chest and flimsy blouse behind you make you fall for the idea of Mick all over again – a gendered arrow "shot through with powerful echoes of the past"9 and spearing boys like Harry Styles, still.

Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an _effect_ and consequence of the imitation itself.10

 _But who's the referent to_ my _carbon copy? Who's behind me?_

You start to imagine that it's Harry brushing against your back, with curls twisted into a man-bun to leave you tongue-tied and a cheek-splitting grin to slice you open. He's not Malfoy; instead of smirking, he smiles, and every time he does it looks like the dam built to barricade his sex drive is going to buckle (along with your knees).

 _How could a 2011 tumblr feed not be full of tween wet dreams steering Louis/Harry into a ship? Why wouldn't teenage girls, "acquisitive, rapacious, insatiable"11 as they are, flatten and reduce the joy of homoerotic boyhood with the thrust of their own, unknown, surging sexualities? Who says that all those crying crowds of thirteen-year-old anxiety aren't suffering the same hysteria as me?_

Confronted with those terrible, quasi-scientific girls' magazines which told young women how to give men sexual pleasure, I turned to novels by gay men to find out why I should bother: for an education in how to love men's bodies. Between the local library and my bookstore job, I worked my way through several books a week, unimaginative but thorough: Edmund White, Alan Hollinghurst, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Derek Jarman's memoirs, every play by Tennessee Williams; I also read writers who weren't gay men but wrote about them, like Pat Barker and Michael Chabon. I bought a second-hand copy of E.M. Forster's _Maurice_ and it turned out to have a love letter handwritten on the inside cover. These were books about people who knew how to be consumed by desire, and how to take desire lightly. I thought they revealed the mysteries of the secret adult world of sex.

I read gay men as a lesson in masculine pleasure, and as a revolt against the unpleasure of femininity. I read them to learn how to be a man. An eccentric neighbour gave me a copy of Jean Genet's _Our Lady of the Flowers_ when I was about 15 – an incredible gift. There I read the immortal line, "A man who fucks a man is a double man!" Typing the sentence out now, it still strikes me with the force of truth. It pleases me because it means, perversely, that a woman who has sex with a man is a man too, and a woman who has sex with women is a double woman. You are what you fuck, and what fucks you is you already, by tacit admission. (Though a friend recently pointed out to me that doubling might not mean intensification but splitting, complicating, fragmenting.)12

Now with a cock threatening to crack open and completely contort your psyche, your arsehole is burning and your breath is panting into a psychoanalytic fever dream. You're losing yourself, like Maggie Nelson giving birth, and the false umbilical cord tying you to social logics of sex rips when you bite into a bunched up corner of your quilt with a sigh meant for Buck Angel: the man who built himself up through reduction and opened up the world through the limits of pornography.

All of life is a process of breaking down.13

"And that's what you want, isn't it? Not to escape 'the inescapable association of sexual positions with mastery and subordination'14 but to fracture and reset a few bones and tendons, to feel those political associations free from gendered regimes and frenemies?" Malfoy asks, confirming that he's still in the room and he'll always be in the room because he'll never not be the spectre of fiction and fantasy sculpting your suspect sexuality. When he asks if you want, "the image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman"15, you groan because your arse is still being remade from behind and you're not immune to pornographic provocation, whether it fits you or not.

The fact of the matter is, MM romance may be _about_ gay men, but it isn't really _ours_.16

You can't look at Malfoy anymore – symbol of plagiarism that he is – so you look over your shoulder, less Hollywood starlet on the red carpet and more Luke Hudson on redtube. What you see makes sense of the familiarity you've been feeling, and the previously unnoticed (so comfortably Sapphic, as they are) silicon sensations threatening your most private bundle of nerves. You recognise Harry Dodge in the place you thought you'd find Harry Styles but relief turns into a heart-jump in your throat when Dodge pushes you back down and diagonally forward with a grip on the back of your neck. Head forced into a different, less comfortable angle, you're now looking down at your chest. With newly orientated eyes, you see Styles' tattoos on your naked torso and lube dripping down your fat thighs and you're freaked out and turned on and-

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sexuality gradually came into existence as a conjunction of strategies for ordering social relations, authorising specialised knowledges, licensing expert interventions, intensifying bodily sensations, normalising erotic behaviours, multiplying sexual perversions, policing personal expressions, crystallising political resistances, motivating introspective utterances, and constructing human subjectivities.17

 _The fact of the matter is, homoerotic masculinity may be the domain of dick-bearing gay males, but it isn't really theirs._

"In my sexual imagination, I'm a gay man. I write to satisfy a sexual desire that I can't physically satisfy in this body." She elaborates: "for a long time, I thought I was transgender. I thought I literally was a gay man trapped in a woman's body. Now I'm just confused. I don't really identify with either gender. But it's taken me 40 years to get to this point."18

Face pressed into the bed you've come but you're still not quite there. You don't know if you want Harry to lie on your back until you overheat or if you need to not have sex for ten years after all of that. You don't know if you're thinking about fucking Butler or Preciado or Angel because you understand them or if you're scared to fuck them because there are things about yourself that you don't want to know – impossible things, fatal things, desires that, if expressed, would force you to realise that what you want out of sex can wreck and run dry everything and everyone you care about when you're not wet.

Sexuality… is thus an apparatus for constituting human subjects.19

1 Amalia Ulman, "The Future Ahead – Improvements for the further masculinization of prepubescent boys" on _YouTube_ , November 4, 2014. Retrieved from watch?v=grpx7VW4qYU

2 Jack Halberstam, "Transgender Butch: Butch/FTM Border Wars and the Masculine Continuum", _Queer Studies Reader_ , eds. Donald E. Hall et. al, (New York: Routledge, 2013), 485.

3 Paul B. Preciado, _Testo Junkie, (_ New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013), 22.

4 Ibid.

5 birdsofshore and raitala, "O Sinners, Let's Go Down", _Archive of our Own_ , July 11, 2015. Retrieved from /works/4251132.

6 Ibid.

7 Guy Hocquenghem, _Homosexual Desire_ , (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1972),101.

8 birdsofshore and raitala, "O Sinners, Let's Go Down".

9 Mark Ellen, "Mick Jagger: Style Icon". _Esquire_ , January 5, 2016. Retrieved from uk/culture/news/a9282/mick-jagger-style-icon/

10 Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in _The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader,_ eds. Henry Abelove et al, (New York, London: Routledge, 1993), 313.

11 Mark Ellen, "Mick Jagger: Style Icon".

12 Hannah Black, "My Gay Shame, or, How Patriarchy Stole Sex", _The New Inquiry_ , May 13, 2014. Retrieved from /my-gay-shame-or-how-patriarchy-stole-sex/.

13 F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-Up", _Esquire_ , February, 1936.

14 Leo Bersani, "Is the rectum a grave?" in _AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism_ , ed. Douglas Crimp. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 216.

15 Ibid, 212.

16 Jamie Fessenden, "My take on women writing MM romance", _Jamie Fessenden's Blog,_ June 28, 2014 _._ Retrieved from /2014/06/28/my-take-on-women-writing-mm-romance/.

17 David Halperin, "Historicising the subject of desire" in _How to do the history of homosexuality_ (Chicago, ILL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 88.

18 Alex Beecroft quoted by Cintra Wilson. "W4M4M?" _Out Magazine,_ August 17, 2010. Retrieved from entertainment/2010/08/17/w4m4m.

19 David Halperin, "Historicising the subject of desire", 88.


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